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My Next Chapter

You have a good job that pays you well at a solid multi-billion dollar company. Why on Earth would you want to go and join a startup? I have heard these words many times over the last few weeks as I have been contemplating the next step in my professional journey. Sometimes, they were asked by family or friends. Sometimes, by people at startups themselves.

The simple answer is I’d like to get on a rocket ship and help it to fly far and fast.

The more detailed answer has more, well, details…

What is this high flying endeavor, you ask? Am I joining a company that is powering the social media revolution with a new service? Am I getting behind the rapid change in how we use robots in every day life? No. I am going to join Actifio in Waltham in their quest to disrupt the data management and storage markets in the enterprise, and I could not possibly be more excited.

Once I convinced my wife that I was not going to a yogurt company, I explained to her, as I explain to all who will listen, that there are three main reasons I am joining Actifio as their new VP of Digital Marketing.

1. Actifio is already incredibly impressive.

For a company that many in the area have still not heard of, Actifio is about to become very well known because their story is compelling. They solve a real problem that enterprise customers need to address – the run-away volume of data, and copies of that data, that are permeating all businesses – and they do it in an simple, elegant way that saves their customers up to 90% on their costs in this area. Good story.

They have one of the most impressive leadership teams I have ever seen, let alone worked with, and they have already had tremendous success in previous endeavors. They are also moving as fast as a rocket ship (hence the obligatory image above) and growing rapidly.

2. The opportunity and challenge is compelling.

The marketing challenge itself is compelling – how do you take all of what has become possible in the last few years via social media, marketing automation, content production and distribution, etc. and roll it into a 21st century marketing model for reaching enterprise technology buyers that puts a human touch on a technical brand and drives awareness, customer acquisition, and creates evangelists for a great product and company…wow. That is a set of questions and answers to keep one awake at night pondering and now I get to help answer them.

3. Miketrap

The last piece is about my journey to get better at what I do and continue to raise my Marketing game. Mike Troiano, Actifio’s CMO, has long been one of my Marketing heroes. He lives out loud, tells it like it is, and is compelling in how he approaches humanizing and simplifying a brand’s story and driving Marketing’s contribution to a company’s bottom line. I have been quoting his maxims in my own work for the last few years and I really could not find a better person to help me in my quest to be a better marketer. To say I am looking forward to working with him would be an understatement.

Given all of that, this is the right step for me.

I have learned a lot and worked with some great people at The Hanover. I will miss my co-workers and I am sure they will go on to do amazing things. But, for me, I am ready to change my game and to raise my game and Actifio gives me a chance to do that.

I can’t wait to get started. Game On.

Photo Credit – Wikimedia

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Word choice matters in sales. A view from the buy side.

After 20 years on the sell side, in both sales and marketing, I have spent the last couple of years on the buy side. As such, I have sat through countless vendor presentations and agency pitches. It is amazing to me how many salespeople, even the better ones, make fairly fundamental mistakes in word choices when they are trying to describe scenarios that relate to your business during sales presentations.

I learned long ago that the key to developing good messaging is listening to the market. Listen to customers and prospects closely. They will not only outline the problem that needs solving – thereby helping to define a feature set – they will also unconsciously “write copy” for you. Listen to enough people and you will hear the patterns of speech for how THEY would describe your product, which coincidentally is the same set of words that will resonate best with them when you sell your solution.

So back to those sales people. The same principles apply to spoken sales language as do to written marketing copy. If you listen first and pick up on the way a prospect or customer describes her business and then use her vocabulary when you speak, your words will resonate better with her. Does she call her distributors “agents”? Don’t call them brokers. Does she “sell direct” to consumers? Don’t call that part of her business “retail”.

Even more important than the words is to make sure you demonstrate a knowledge of the customer’s business. Don’t talk about selling direct if the business is purely based on a distribution network. This is basic homework. Read the company’s website before the meeting. Take note of the things that show how the organization does business and the words they use to describe it and their products. Though they may not even know it, they will appreciate that you speak their language and that they don’t have to correct your incorrect assumptions. Start the meeting by asking them to talk about their problem before you pitch your solution. Pay close attention to the words they use while speaking and use the same vocabulary when you finally do present your solution. It will resonate better with them.

It’s not rocket surgery… Why do so few salespeople get this right?

Image credit: Dullhunk

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Click Behavior and Google+ Profile Help Search Rankings

Two recent experiences with my personal website davidmeiselman.com have given me some anecdotal evidence of how Google uses a couple of factors in driving its ranking algorithm:

1. how often people click on a link to your site in the search results
2. having a Google Plus profile associated with your site.

I have had this site now for a number of years, both as a platform to share my professional expertise and to try to “own your own brand” and have a greater share of the top google search results for my own name (you can’t come across as knowing much about SEO if you don’t appear prominently in results when someone Googles your name…). But paying some level of attention to how I rank for my own name has also given me some insights into Google’s ranking algorithm.

The first thing I noticed a few months ago was that I was getting a good chunk of visits to my site coming in through my resume page. Many of those visits were being driven by search queries for people with resumes like mine. Clearly I was showing up high enough in those searches to get some clicks. I also noticed that when googling my name, that my resume page was the second page from my site to show up in the SERPs. Given this level of “success” (I still get very low site visitation in the grand scheme of things so it’s all relative…), I figured I must have gotten some links to the page from somewhere that was helping the authority of the page and helping it to rank. So, I checked my inbound links to that page and found…nothing! So why then was the resume page ranking higher than other pages that actually had an inbound link or two? the only answer I could come up with was that this page was appearing more in search results and getting more click-throughs from those results than any other on my site.

The second thing I noticed happened when Google+ launched this summer. I haven’t been updating this blog in quite some time (I have pledged to remedy this, hence this and forthcoming posts) but I noticed a distinct change in my ranking once I joined G+ with my Google profile. Just prior to this, my site had actually slipped to #2 in the SERPs for my name – due I assume to the aforementioned inactivity. Literally the day after I joined G+, with no other changes or activity on the site, I reclaimed the top spot in the SERPs…It’s important to note that my google profile already linked to my site, but it was my activity in G+ under that profile which drove the impact to the SERPs.

Now none of this is a remarkable discovery or something that top seo people haven’t already written about. But it was really interesting to see the evidence of these factors impacting my own site’s rankings. As I pick up my blogging again and have new fresh content (that will be shared via social channels) it will be interesting to watch how my site’s appearance in my personal branded SERPs changes… I will write a follow up post when that happens.

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Most important social media strategy…be awesome, or else.

Brand and message control is an illusion…so your product and service had better be awesome.

The current rush by companies to implement a social media strategy is interesting to watch, but often misses the point. Too many marketers are still thinking in a uni-directional way…asking “how do we use social media to get our message out?” Even some savvy marketers who recognize that social media enables easier dialogs with their customers are missing a big piece of the sea change that is going on here.

Your brand/product/service is already being discussed and you have very little ability to effect that conversation just by having a social media strategy. Don’t get me wrong, it is HUGELY important to be involved, responsive, and real as a human voice in social media, representing your thing. But while you can help around the edges, the real conversation will be dictated by what you do, not by what you say.

Is your product amazing? People will talk about it. Does your customer service suck? Believe me…people will talk about it. They always have. It’s just that they used to talk to a dozen of their friends and that story might have spread to a dozen more if it was remarkable.

Social media today gives people a VIRAL MEGAPHONE to reach a lot more people. And you had better hope you don’t piss off someone who is really creative…witness the video below. This is a (very funny) customer complaint that at last count had reached 2.5 MILLION views…I saw it over the weekend in a few different blog/Twitter streams that I follow.

Seth Godin has been saying this for a long time. Develop something remarkable and people will talk about you. Today they just might reach millions of people talking about you. You had better hope it is for the good you did and not the bad…

Image credit – taken from United Breaks Guitars video by Dave Carroll

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Liveblogging makes conference attendance virtual and asynchronous!

Liveblogging conferences for virtual attendance
Liveblogging conferences for virtual attendance

More and more I am getting something out of all those great events that I am not able to attend due to time or expense. Occasionally events get covered in videos that are made public and posted to YouTube, but often there is no video available for events. For those events, there is often an industry blogger who covers the event by liveblogging from each session.

While some sessions are more easily covered than others, some bloggers do an amazing job of conveying both the gist and the details of presentations, questions and answers. I recently “virtually attended” SMX West by reading the excellent SMX West liveblogging coverage by Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media.

It’s not the same thing as being there (for one thing it is hard to network and chat with people by reading), but getting ideas and keeping abreast of trends is really possible. I also find that even though many of the presenters have blogs, they tend to organize their material differently in a presentation. If you are lucky enough to have them post their deck on slideshare or another such service, the liveblogging combines well to give you 90% of the idea flow.

Of course, my kitchen is not as exotic a place to consume this stuff as live in New York, San Fran, or Seattle, but it is way cheaper.

Photo by jimjarmo.

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Why blog here?

Those who know me well also know that I have blogged in the past. When I was blogging semi-regularly at liberty egg, one of the things that I often struggled with was how to balance work or professional thinking and writing with personal posting. If I want to build a set of posts that reflect my professional work, do I really want to post pictures of my kids in the same place? Likewise, do all of my friends and family care about the nuances of online marketing?

So as I was thinking about creating and managing my online profile, it occurred to me that I needed more than one place online to post my thoughts and think out loud. So this place will now be where I talk about those things I deal with professionally – marketing, the web, technology, and how businesses are creating a new economic model. Exciting stuff for me. If it’s not exciting for you and you are here for my personal life or thoughts, go to liberty egg where I will rebuilding my personal blog soon.